 | This user has publicly declared that he has a conflict of interest regarding the Wikipedia article Freeze-fracture. |
Name: Wouterus Thomas Maria Gruijters. Prefer Terry. Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Long time user of Wikipedia. Studied and experimented on the structure and composition of gap junctions for a while so thought I maybe able to contribute towards clarifying some of the confusion I saw on the wiki. By the way, love the SVG work on the gap junction page and elsewhere done by Marianna the User:LadyofHats.
Today I had to look up what a "POV pusher" was on yet another personal wiki page with no key to the acronyms it was using. This is never a good idea but is happening more and more over time on the Wikipedia and scientific literature. People seem to think the more they use acronyms the more professional they sound. Sometimes, in certain limited circumstances, they are useful. Sometimes so many are used the reader is forced to spend their intellect more on translating the acronyms than on the meaning of the overall article. As the same acronym can often have different meanings in different contexts, not listing the acronyms expansions used on a document and using too many opens the door to confusion and misinterpretation. The more confusion, the more likely your point of view will be read amongst the confusion and the more hits you might get on your blogs or whatever.
There was an acronym that was bandied about when I was younger, before public search engines were readily available and up to date, that took me a while to find out the meaning of, so I was left out of many conversations. "KISS" meaning "keep it simple stupid". I eventually asked the question at the time why not keep it simple and just say keep it simple rather than add to the complexity? The answer was hollow laughter. In the context of the conversation it became apparent that using "KISS" without explaining it was to exclude others from the conversation. The irony of using a KISS to make things complex was not missed on me.
The moral of that short story is to keep the Wikipedia language as simple as possible. Sure the language can be forced into specialist and technical terminology, but the structure should be as legible as possible. Wikipedia will be a less open and equitable source of knowledge if we don't try to make it as readable to as wide an audience as possible. Where possible use the language of the people, not of the professional.